1. Lady Gaga owes her stage name to her friends. In the mid-2000s, Gaga was performing under her given name, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, and started the Stefani Germanotta Band (SGBand). The singer told Vogue.com: “My friends on the Lower East Side called me Gaga after I decided I like the name Lady Gaga, after the Queen song [‘Radio Ga Ga’]. I thought it accurately depicted both sides of me.”

2. While Gaga committed to music early on—she dropped out of New York University after her freshman year to pursue her passion full-time—she also had a brief flirtation with acting. When she was 15 years old, Gaga had a blink-and-you-miss-her role on The Sopranos, and, a few years later, she also had a brief cameo on The Hills. Kelly Cutrone, an executive of The Hills, spoke to MTV in 2010 about Gaga’s oft-forgotten role: “You know Lady Gaga; we put her on The Hills. Do you remember that? Nobody remembers,” Cutrone said. “MTV has got to take credit for this right now because People’s Revolution put Lady Gaga on TV before anybody.”

3. Gaga’s outrageous performance style didn’t always rub people the right way, and at one point, that included her own father. The singer recalls when her dad first saw her onstage, she was wearing “a leopard-thong-fringed bikini with a sequined high-waisted belt and granny panties, and it was so wrong, it was amazing.” While he stayed throughout the entire performance, and told Gaga that she “did a great job,” he was concerned for his daughter’s well-being. “He was shocked. And alarmed,” she said. “My mother told me he broke down and told her he thought I was crazy. Really crazy. Later that week, my family said, ‘It was just really hard to watch that show, and we think you’ve lost your mind and we don’t know what to do.’ ”

4. She wrote her first hit, “Just Dance,” in record time. “I was very hungover. I wrote the song in about 10 minutes with [producer] RedOne. And it was my first time being in a Hollywood studio. Very pristine, big huge room with giant speakers.” She told The Guardian in 2009 that she initially had trouble getting radio stations to play it. “We’ve been trying to get it played in the U.S. since March,” she said. “I mean, it just doesn’t sound like Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed a Girl’—which is a beautiful, lovely, amazing hit record and it sounds like a radio hit. My song doesn’t sound like a radio hit. I mean, it does, but it doesn’t.”

5. While Gaga is credited as one of the most innovative artists in the business, she’s also responsible for a revolutionary invention in the world of perfume. When she was creating her first fragrance, Fame, she told executives at Coty that she wanted the liquid to be black in the bottle and clear when it sprayed. “I started to sweat on my forehead,” Yael Tuil, the vice president of global marketing at Coty, told Vogue in 2012. “I said, ‘My God! That’s impossible! How can we do that?’ ” Eventually, scientists developed a potion to meet Gaga’s specs, and the company now has a patent pending for the black-to-clear liquid technology. “She was really behind the most important innovation in the fragrance industry in the last 20 years,” Tuil said. “She is really pushing boundaries.”